SOGo—Open-Source Groupware

More than two years have passed since I last wrote about SOGo for Linux Journal. Since then, the project has matured greatly and now is being used successfully in tons of large-scale deployments. SOGo's strengths are really about scalability; component re-usability (IMAP, LDAP, SMTP and database server); compliance to standards, such as CalDAV and CardDAV; and excellent interoperability with popular applications, such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple iCal/Address Book and Microsoft Outlook. The latter is supported through a close collaboration between the SOGo and OpenChange Projects.

Since my last article, there have been more fluctuations in the world of open-source groupware, including:

The first incarnation of SOGo appeared with v1.0 in March 2009, and versions up to 1.3.2 quickly followed. This article presents the current state of SOGo, its integration capabilities with desktop and mobile clients and provides simple instructions to get a workable installation quickly.

Installing SOGo is very easy, as packages are available for a variety of GNU/Linux-based distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise (and CentOS), Debian and Ubuntu. An Ubuntu-based virtual appliance also is available, which provides a complete out-of-the-box testing environment of SOGo. Here, I provide high-level installation and configuration instructions. For more in-depth instructions, look at the official SOGo documentation, which covers everything, including instructions for desktop clients and mobile devices.

SOGo leverages virtually every part of your infrastructure. It makes use of the following:

Of course, when you do not have such components in your environment, best-of-breed ones can be used from the free and Open Source community. SOGo will literally transform those loosely coupled components into a single and coherent groupware solution, which then can be accessed from your favorite Web browser or from a variety of desktop and mobile clients.

Assuming you have an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation and you prefer MySQL, let's proceed with the installation of SOGo and its dependencies. First, add SOGo's repository to your APT sources list, and resynchronize the package index files from their sources:

% sudo su -
% echo 'deb http://inverse.ca/ubuntu lucid main' 
  ↪>> /etc/apt/sources.list
% apt-get update 

Then, install SOGo, its dependencies, Apache and MySQL:

% apt-get install sogo sope4.9-gdl1-mysql apache2 mysql-server 

If you get Apache startup errors after the installation, ignore them. Next, create the SOGo database and the required user:

mysql -h localhost -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE sogo CHARSET='UTF8';
mysql> CREATE USER 'sogo'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'secret';
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sogo.* TO 'sogo'@'localhost';

SOGo's database will be used to store events, tasks, contacts and user preferences. To keep this installation as simple as possible, let's also use MySQL for user authentication. To make this work, create a database table holding user information, and add three test users all with the same MD5-encrypted password (“secret”):

mysql> USE sogo;
mysql> CREATE TABLE sogo_users (c_uid VARCHAR(10) PRIMARY KEY, 
 ↪c_name VARCHAR(10), c_password VARCHAR(32), 
 ↪c_cn VARCHAR(128), mail VARCHAR(128));
mysql> INSERT INTO sogo_users VALUES ('alice', 'alice', 
 ↪MD5('secret'), 'Alice Thompson', 'alice@acme.com');
mysql> INSERT INTO sogo_users VALUES ('bob', 'bob', MD5('secret'), 
 ↪'Bob Smith', 'bob@acme.com');
mysql> INSERT INTO sogo_users VALUES ('chris', 'chris', MD5('secret'), 
 ↪'Chris Cooper', 'chris@acme.com');

In a read-world environment, your database table probably would be much more complex than that. It also might be a database view on your existing information, and in many cases, an LDAP server will be used for authentication and user information retrieval instead. SOGo supports multiple authentication sources, so you also could have an LDAP server for authentication used together with an SQL view on your CRM contacts that would be exposed as an address book to all your SOGo users.

Next, let Apache proxy requests to SOGo. Because SOGo is not a fully compliant HTTP server, you should use Apache (or any other HTTP server) in front of it by enabling some required modules:

% a2enmod proxy
% a2enmod proxy_http
% a2enmod headers

Once enabled, you must configure SOGo so that it uses your newly created MySQL database. Again, in this example, let's not configure the Web mail part of SOGo to keep the configuration as simple as possible. Nonetheless, if you do have a working IMAP server installation (Cyrus IMAP Server and Dovecot are recommended), it will work out of the box if SOGo and your IMAP server use the same authentication source.

Proceed with SOGo's configuration under the “sogo” user. This is very important as the sogod dæmon will run under the sogo user, so the preferences created by the defaults utility must belong to the sogo user:

% sudo su - sogo
% defaults write sogod SOGoTimeZone "America/Montreal"
% defaults write sogod SOGoMailDomain "acme.com"
% defaults write sogod SOGoLanguage English 
% defaults write sogod SOGoUserSources '({canAuthenticate = YES; 
 ↪displayName = "SOGo Users"; id = users; isAddressBook = YES; 
 ↪type = sql; userPasswordAlgorithm = md5; viewURL = 
 ↪"mysql://sogo:secret@127.0.0.1:3306/sogo/sogo_users";})'
% defaults write sogod SOGoProfileURL 
 ↪'mysql://root:secret@127.0.0.1:3306/sogo/sogo_user_profile'
% defaults write sogod OCSFolderInfoURL 
 ↪'mysql://root:secret@127.0.0.1:3306/sogo/sogo_folder_info'
% defaults write sogod SOGoAppointmentSendEMailNotifications NO
% defaults write sogod SOGoLoginModule Calendar
% exit

Finally, modify the /etc/apache2/conf.d/SOGo.conf configuration file to use localhost with no SSL. So replace the following:

RequestHeader set "x-webobjects-server-port" "443"
RequestHeader set "x-webobjects-server-name" "yourhostname"
RequestHeader set "x-webobjects-server-url" "https://yourhostname"